Looking back over my portfolio, I can see a clear progression in the way I think and write about travel literature, empire, and the figures we studied. My earliest post, the Yasmina playlist, was driven by empathy and atmosphere. My initial approach was to look for feeling and emotional resonance. As the semester continued, I began to shift my writing to focus more on examining power, especially with Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark. At the end, with Lawrence, I was more intrigued about the psychology of the spies we were studying.
One of my favorite ideas I developed this semester was presented in my “Bystander” blog post. Reframing Lawrence’s torture writing helped me confront something that his narrative often avoids: the uncomfortable representation of performance, trauma, and discipline that is embedded in his demeanor. I explored how the heroic silence was simply a form of survival strategy that could be linked to his internalized need for punishment and also just trauma from the past. I liked this idea because it helped me do a more complicated and human reading of Lawrence.
An important thing I was able to do through these blog posts and the midterm was experiment between analytic and creative writing. Creative writing, like Bystander, the Yasmina Playlist, and the play I wrote, allowed me to look at the spies’s travel writing as performative. They were constantly staging themselves after all, whether as experts, wanderers, diplomats, or heroes. I was able to question why these authors chose to present themselves in the way they did, which I have never done before in a class. Through analytic reading and writing, I was able to learn to read these texts with a specific lens in mind. Looking at the writing with all of these factors, like political structure and alliances, helped reframe it.
Going forward, I would love to know more about how people actually affected by these spies remembered these figures. A lot of what we read came from the Western world. But I would like to know how, say the local people of the past saw Gertrude Bell. I am also a sucker for psychoanalytic analysis, so I would love to see what psychologists think about some of these spies. Something else that would be interesting is to think about what these narratives would look like if they written today. How would Lawrence write about himself today?
